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I'm running Win XP Media Center Edition w/ an AMD Athlon 64 3500+. and I attempted to upgrade to Win 7. However, I found that I bought a Win 7 64 Bit OS, and the OS on the system that I have is Win XP MCE is 32 Bit, so I I could not upgrade, I'd need to do a fresh install. When I restarted and booted up with the Win 7 64 Bit disc, I backed out of the installation BEFORE I got to the screen where you select the HD Partition, and cancelled the install (I have quickbooks data that I need to backup first).

When I went to restart back in to Win XP MCE, I got the following error:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:\system32\hal.dll.Please re-install a copy of the above file.

I do not have the Win XP MCE disc, but I have a Win XP Pro disc.

Here are my questions:

1) Is there a way that I copy the hal.dll file from the Win XP Pro disc into the system32 folder? If so, how? In a WinPE environment (and if so, how do I create a WinPE bootable from a flash drive or CD/DVD)?

2) If I just went ahead and installed Win 7 fresh, I read that there will be a Windows.old folder placed on the hard drive. Will this include my quickbooks files and other documents (obviously not installed programs)?